This is inspired by this advice from a few months ago:
Stop giving shitty mods a free pass. Honest mistakes happen; but if the mod in question is assumptive, disingenuous, trigger-happy, or eager to enable certain shitty types of user, spread the word about their comm being poorly moderated. And don’t interact directly with the comm. I think that at least here in the Fediverse we should demand higher standards from our mods.
(Emphasis mine.)
In the past I have used places like !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world or !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone to call out mods on other subs, with mid-to-almost-high degrees of success, but I wonder if it would be better to have a dedicated sublemmy?
Here are my thoughts on what would make this effective:
- probably shouldn’t be hosted on .world due to the breadth of possible conflicts of interest with admins
- probably shouldn’t be hosted on .ml due to federation hurdles
- mods of the community shouldn’t moderate any other communities of any significant size, in order to make the whole “accountability” thing work
- mods should be willing and able to deal with substantial quantities of garbage posts because there would be a lot of “why won’t c/xyz let me be transphobic/say slurs 😡😡” type submissions which, left unaddressed, would outflood genuine criticism
This is still in conceptual form so I am interested what others think :)
The last time I encountered a power trip mod, I created another community on the same topic, brought other people who were unsatisfied over, and the new community is much more active than the initial one.
It takes quite a while though.
Not really sure what this will achieve in the long run. Sure, some mods will up their game after being shamed… but would this not just encourage toxic behaviour? People may start shaming mods just because they may slightly disagree with them as opposed to because they are bad mods. Instead of a few bad eggs, we may end up with a chaotic community of people blasting and publicly shaming anyone with differing opinions. Is this the best way to go about this? Obviously I may be exaggerating slightly, but this is just to get across a point to consider. I know you have touched on this issue already, but another thing to consider is the potential bias of mods of this community as well. This is an interesting idea and I would also like to hear other people’s opinions on the matter.
There is also the deep asymmetry of effort. Nearly all moderators are volunteers that put in largely invisible effort every day, for no return. As all humans they sometimes make mistakes and can also have a bad day.
On the other hand there are people that put almost no effort in, but are deeply offended by any moderation action against them and will rise a huge stink about it.
These two factors together make people very reluctant to volunteer for moderation duties in popular communities, which is a major issue for the health of the Lemmyverse as a whole.
ACAB includes mods. These jobs attract the kind of reddit/lemmy users who want to have power over a petty fiefdom and abuse it. Good mods only get shamed for ridiculous reasons like “Wouldn’t let me be transphobic” and “enforced the rules”. Bad mods get shame they deserve. Mods get paid in power over others, and as an anarchist, I personally seek to ensure that power is constantly questioned, and abolished if it’s abused.
I say all this as the owner of a sublemmy, and I expect to be held to the same standard.
As an Anarchist myself: this is the most absurd take on ACAB and moderation I have heard in a while.
And apparently you have been lucky to not have had to deal with bad-faith concern trolling that some narcissist like to do online.
These are valid concerns that could certainly prove problematic without further insight. :) Thanks for sharing.
Most large instances have a support community. That seems like the suitable place to raise a moderation issue with specific a community on the instance.
Yes, but at the same time, it depends on the instance policy as a whole.
Some instance admins prefer to not interfere with how mods handle their communities (which is also a valid stance, I’m not criticizing it), but that means that in the end it wouldn’t have that much impact. And most of the users wouldn’t probably see the posts in the support community.
This would be a perfect solution I think, if most major mods and subs weren’t hosted on .world and .ml.
The conflict of interest is real and intense; I have been told directly that certain problematic .world mod activity cannot be addressed because the mods in question are close friends with instance admins.
Thanks for your thoughts :)
I think it’s essential to have one or more communities like this. There were a few on reddit – watchredditdie, declineintocensorship, and more. The admins shut them down. I was unsuccessful in getting them to move over to Lemmy.
Absolutely the same things happen on lemmy. It’s to be expected from both mods and admins. We need to have a place we can go to find out “which are the bad communities & instances”.
The main problem I foresee is that those “watchredditdie and declineintocensorship” subs seemed to be well modded and mostly populated with intelligent people. In contrast, lemmy seems to have quite a lot of trolls, unintelligent people, and likely astroturfing. That will make things more difficult.
